But…But…They Don’t Really LOVE…

A quote by newly out Christian musician Jennifer Knapp scrolled by my screen a few moments ago. I’m going to quote the entire passage from the Christianity Today interview…

Q: So why come out of the closet, so to speak?

Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through‚Äîand I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it‚Äîis feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.

[Emphasis mine...] But asking people to acknowledge that same-sex couples love is precisely the problem. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… People sitting in the pews side-by-side with their gay neighbors aren’t asking them to choose between their love and their faith. When they look at same-sex couples they don’t see love at all…merely sex. They are “struggling with homosexuality”. The bedrock prejudice insists, absolutely insists, that is all there is to same-sex couples. Empty, barren, transient lust. Gay couples, as Orson Scott Card once said, are just playing dress-up…

“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were…”

“They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes…”

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… There’s the problem. Look at it if you have the nerve. This isn’t about sex.

In the fight over same-sex marriage, it’s often argued that gay couples cannot rise to the level of marriage because they don’t produce children, and marriage is mostly about family life. But this argument is a sham. And it mirrors another sham argument often heard in conservative religious communities, that being homosexual is not a sin, only engaging in homosexual acts is. If only the homosexuals just didn’t have sex, they could be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven too…just like the rest of us. But heterosexual couples, medically incapable of having sex, are as welcome to marriage as they are the Kingdom and nobody in either group is saying that same-sex couples can marry as long as they don’t have sex.

The heterosexual couple who stick together even if they are denied a sex life, are seen as vindicating the power of love. That is why sterility among heterosexuals is no barrier to marriage. But same-sex couples somehow defile the institute of marriage with their very presence, whether they bring children into it (via adoption) or not, whether they can have sex or not. And that is because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.

It’s not about children. It’s not about family life. It’s not even about heterosexuality. What homosexuals steal from people like Orson Scott Card is the idea that marriage is about love. All arguments to the contrary, what this fight is about, Exactly, is love, and who can be allowed to love and be loved, and who cannot. Marriage is love’s sanctuary, a sacred place where lovers can find shelter, protection, support. Letting homosexuals, who are incapable of love, into it, defiles that sanctuary, turning it from a sacred place into a brothel.

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be…In 1983, Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident leaving her unable to care for herself. Her lover, Karen Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands and shared a house, had to fight a long and bitter legal battle with Kowalski’s parents, who refused to allow Thompson any contact at all with their daughter. When Sharon, with difficulty, typed her wishes to go back home with Karen on a keyboard provided by a doctor, her parents took the keyboard away. At one point, Donald Kowalski, Sharon’s father, asked a reporter in exasperated frustration “What does that woman want with my daughter…she’s in diapers!” For almost nine years Thompson fought it out in court with Kowalski’s parents, refusing to let the woman she loved be condemned to life in a nursing home where she would be kept isolated from the world outside and denied any therapy that would have allowed her to communicate her wishes to be taken back home to Karen. When she finally won, Donald Kowalski called her an animal.

What does that woman want with my daughter… A same-sex couple who cannot have sex would be, if unrepentant nonetheless, ineligible for the Kingdom, let alone marriage. It’s not about the Act, if not engaging in the Act makes no difference. Their crime is that they love, and love is not permitted to homosexuals.

We cannot be human beings, we must be animals. Not sinners in need of salvation, but scapegoats for other people’s sins. The right wing politician who goes hiking the Appalachian trail with his mistress while his wife and children wonder where the hell he went. The religious right preacher who gets caught visiting prostitutes. The conservative moralizer who gets caught gambling. Jennifer Knapp didn’t choose love over faith, but love over fame because there was no other way. Karen Thompson fought for nine years to free her beloved because their was no other way. The gay civil rights struggle is not a fight over scripture. It has nothing to do with faith. It is not about sex. It is a fight over the right, the essential human need, to love and be loved. Because love can overcome any obstacle, endure any hardship, hold on to any hope no matter how distant and faint. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.

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4 Comments

There should never be no one on the face of this earth to judge you or anyone else. The only one that can judge you is GOD, and he created each and everyone of us, but he made each one of us different,if we were all alike that would be boring.Yes GOD before any one says anything,I have a daughter that is gay and let me tell you, people look most of there lives to find the kind of love they have.Its not just sex its real true love and I see this first hand,I just thank GOD that she has found her wife and I look at it like this BE WHO YOU ARE and hoppfully you will find that perfect person, be it male or female, aslong as its LOVE.

Paul McApril 19, 2010 at 5:28 pm -

For the record, I read Scott-Card’s Ender’s Game, the book that made him famous.

Result:

the most morally bankrupt and dishonest piece of science fiction I’ve ever read. It’s like a piece of propaganda the Nazis would have welcomed for its nihilist message of hate and elimination of the ‘other’ at all costs.

MerlynApril 20, 2010 at 2:24 am -

Yeah, Orson Scott Card is disgusting.

I would love one of those bigots to tell my spouse that we don’t REALLY love each other, that all it is is sex. They’d get an a*s kicking that they would never forget. She would die for me as I would for her. We married in Canada because we LOVE each other and wanted that commitment on a legal level, if only in Canada.

It is so nauseating that all the homophobes can see is sex, when if a couple is in love and you have eyes to see you can see it. They are blind fools.

Its kinda difficult really because gay love isn’t really seen as real love either – I’m thinking of the Mother in Torch Song Trilogy when she compared her marriage to her sons love for a man and didn’t find them equal at all.

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